Hand-Made

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I’m often amazed by how paper sculptors--working with a practically two-dimensional material, and one that is treated as quite ephemeral--can create inventive and elegant sculptural forms. Artists whose work in paper I’ve been admiring quite a bit lately include Su Blackwell, who conjures complex literary scenes from book pages, and Yuken Teruya, whose tiny forest worlds created from discarded paper bags and rolls invite us to reconsider habits of consumption.

Would you like to investigate paper sculpture? The library has a number of mid-twentieth-century books that I like for the window they open into the medium’s use in advertising and window dressing as well as for the how-to projects they include. Two that I like in particular are Sculpture in Paper and Paper Sculpture, both of which are illustrated with commercial paper sculptures evocative of that period. And here (above and below) are a couple of pages from Paper Sculpture, in which author and sculptor Arthur Sadler shows you how to make an owl: